Better audio performance when video stream is monitored by TCP congestion control

Conventional wisdom holds that the TCP like congestion control is unsuitable for real-time multimedia conferencing. However, our results clearly show that an audio and video conferencing system that transmits video over TCP (and audio over RTP/UDP) can provide significantly better audio quality to the end user than one built on RTP/UDP alone. We measured audio quality in terms of packet loss, packets arriving too late (for real time play out), average packet delay, and jitter. Our results also clearly indicate that sending video over TCP does not introduce any additional delay in the arrival time of video packets in comparison to RTP/UDP.